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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Friday, October 21, 2011

Margarine Is Still Illegal -- And Nobody Cares

I don't make any secret of my disdain
for margarine. I find that it tastes like exactly what it is;
processed yellow-colored hydrogenated vegetable oil. I never bought
into the bogus health claims made by its purveyors and current food
and nutrition science doesn't either.

I've always wondered; if margarine is
so great, why do the marketers of the stuff insist on names like “I
Can't Believe It's Not Butter?” Why do they tout how “buttery
tasting” their product is? Never once have I heard a butter maker
proclaim, “Wow! It tastes just like margarine!” Even the URL for
the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers proclaims the
popularity of real butter – butteryspreads.org. Hey, what's wrong
with “margarineyspreads.org, huh? For my money, if I want something
that tastes like butter, I buy butter!

Margarine is nothing but a cheap
substitute for the real thing. And I don't believe in cheap
substitutes. I once saw a Volkswagen Beetle with a kit-built
Rolls-Royce front end bolted on. That's margarine. You can dress it
up, but it's still a Volkswagen.

Margarine has been a cheap imitation
from Day 1. That's it's purpose, it's raison d'etre.
The 19th
century French government needed a cheap substitute for butter to
foist off on its troops. A French chemist named Hippolyte
Mège-Mouriès invented a substance he called oleomargarine
and the rest is history.

Needless to say,
the dairy industry was not happy with the new kid on the block. It
wasn't long before farmers in dairying states were up in arms,
demanding that something be done about margarine for the sake of
preserving the health and well being of their market and of their
very way of life. Ultimately, by 1902, thirty-two of America's
forty-five states had some form of restriction on colored margarine.
And, of course, Wisconsin lawmakers were at the head of the charge.
In 1895, “America's Dairyland” enacted stringent laws prohibiting
the manufacture, sale, or use of margarine colored to imitate butter.

In its
unadulterated form, margarine is a pasty white color. Just imagine
spreading a nice thick, greasy layer of Crisco on your toast.
Margarine makers, realizing that such an unappealing appearance was a
real marketing drawback, began selling yellow food dye capsules with
their unattractive product to make it more…well...attractive. (At
one point, an attempt was made to force margarine manufacturers to
color their product pink, but
the Supreme Court struck down such forced coloration restrictions.)
By and large, the gimmick worked and people started buying the
second-rate substitute not because it was better than butter but
because it was cheap. In
those days nobody knew anything about saturated fats and trans fats
and cholesterol. And as long as the stuff sorta looked like
butter, well, you could almost get over the unnatural artificial
flavor. Factor in the widespread dairy product rationing that
accompanied a couple of subsequent world wars, and, despite heavy
taxation and restrictive legislation in the dairy states, the demand
for margarine took off. Kind of like Prohibition; the best way to
popularize a substance is to make it illegal.

In fact, now that
the statute of limitations has probably expired, I can come clean and
admit it; back in the '50s, my dad was a bootlegger. We lived just a
few miles north of the Illinois border. Margarine was legal in the
Land of Lincoln and my dad used to take orders from friends and
neighbors throughout the week and then head south on Saturday to fill
up the trunk of his car with contraband, bringing it back to
Wisconsin for clandestine distribution. Oh, the shame!

But
those days are all behind us now, right? Even as liquor began to flow
after the 18th
Amendment was repealed in 1933, legal margarine has spread itself
across the land and is now free for all to consume without
legislative restriction, right? Wrong.

That's right.
Wrong. While some statutes in previously anti-margarine states have
been quietly removed from the books over the years, some laws in some
states remain in effect. Granted, they're not enforced, but they're
still there.

Spurred on by the
aforementioned National Association of Margarine Manufacturers and
other lobbyists, laws regulating the sale and use of margarine came
under serious fire in the 1950s and '60s. Federal taxes on margarine
were eliminated in 1951. State color bans, taxes, and other legal
measures began to fall to well-funded pressure until, in 1967,
Wisconsin became the last state to end its restrictions on margarine.
Happy days were here again and people like my dad were out of
business.

But....

Wisconsinites are a determined lot and
they didn't completely cave in to the interests pushing fake butter.
While all the old laws regulating butter were repealed in '67, a new
one was added. That law, targeted at the food service industry, made
it illegal for restaurants to serve margarine as a replacement for
butter. Customers can request margarine, but it can't legally be the
default table offering. And if a restaurant insists on serving
margarine, the law insists that it make butter an available option.
The law also requires that butter be served to students in schools,
patients in hospitals, and inmates in prisons. Anybody who violates
margarine laws faces fines ranging from $100 to $500 and they can be
jailed for up to three months for the first offense. Fines and jail
time increase for additional violations, with recidivist margarine
offenders subject to fines of $500 to $1,000 and six months to a year
in the pokey.

Nobody
can remember the last time the law was enforced, if it ever has been.
One or two complaints trickle in to the Wisconsin Department of
Agriculture every year. And the authorities dutifully send out
warning letters. And that's about it. Most consumers don't even know
the law exists and most restaurant owners, if aware if it, don't
care. And they don't care for a very good reason; most of their
customers don't want margarine.
One Wisconsin restaurateur says he goes through five or six times as
much butter as margarine. Another says if he puts out margarine, his
customers won't touch it.

But there is the whole money thing and
that's why a Wisconsin state representative, one Dale Kooyenga, is
out gunning for the last of the state's margarine laws. Something
like 21,000 inmates are being fed expensive butter when margarine is
cheaper. And besides, he feels it's an antiquated, anti-free market
law that's just plain silly. And silly laws, he believes, “erode
citizen's respect for the overall rule of law in our state.”

Now, Wisconsin has a boat-load of silly
laws. Why isn't Rep. Kooyenga going after the law that bars cats and
dogs from cemeteries (excepting dogs guiding the blind, of course.)
Or perhaps he should tackle bike riders in Sun Prairie who ride with
no hands: “No bicycle shall be allowed to proceed in any street
in the city by inertia or momentum with the feet of the rider removed
from the bicycle pedals. No rider of a bicycle shall remove both
hands from the handlebars or practice any trick or fancy riding in
any street in the city nor shall any bicycle rider carry or ride any
other person so that two persons are on the bicycle at one time,
unless a seat is provided for a second person.” Man,
I should still be doing time for the number of violations I clocked
against that one back in the day. Women in Racine can't walk the
streets at night without being accompanied by a male. Milwaukee says
if you look offensive you're not allowed to be seen on the street
during the day. LaCrosse bans unclothed mannequins in store windows.
And my personal favorite, one I think the Honorable Mr. Kooyenga
ought to challenge: according to state law, when two trains are at an
intersection, neither shall move until the other does.

It's a good thing
I'm no longer a citizen of Wisconsin. I'd feel so eroded.

Apparently, there
aren't too many of Kooyenga's compatriots who fear erosion over the
margarine law. At last count, only eleven other lawmakers – out of
a possible 132 – have signed on as co-sponsors of his bill. The
other 120 are no doubt sitting in their favorite eateries slathering
delicious, all-natural butter on everything from fresh bread to corn
on the cob.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)